THERESIENSTADT

Between November 24, 1941, to May 9, 1945, 140,000 Jews entered the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt; among them, 15,000 children and many of the greatest Jewish artists and academics of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Only 17,000 survived. The rest were deported to Auschwitz and other death camps (90,000) or died there of starvation and disease (33,000). The crematorium at Theresienstadt in 1942 burned 2000 bodies a day. 

Despite the brutality of Theresienstadt, the camp passed an “inspection” by the International Red Cross in June 1944, when the Nazi murder machines burned at full speed. After immense pressure by the Danish government to assess the conditions of the Danish Jews imprisoned there, the Nazis finally relented and allowed representatives from Denmark and the IRC to visit. Before they arrived, however, the Nazis created an elaborate hoax and used their visit for propaganda purposes: they first “beautified” and renovated the camp, planted gardens, and forced the prisoners to act as if they were at a leisure recreational facility; forcing the sickly children to play soccer and some Jews to dress up as policemen. The sickest of the prisoners were deported to Auschwitz beforehand. What did the inspectors see? How did they NOT feel what was happening beneath the artifice; recognize the lie created by the Nazis? 

Over seventy years after the inspectors’ visit, in August 2018, I spent an afternoon with my husband, Stan, touring Theresienstadt, now a museum, located in Terezin, Czechia. I felt an urgency to use my camera both to metabolize the incomprehensible crimes against humanity that took place there as well as document this irrefutable horrific chapter in modern history. What did I see? What did I feel? 

With far too much anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the news of late, I decided in 2021 to pull out a few of my photos from that day. As I worked in my studio, trying to draw light out of the dark images, I realized that one photo, in particular, captured a reality I had missed, or perhaps been unable to see three years earlier. On the clothesline, hanging upside down beside a few bottles was neither, as I had thought, a man’s undershirt, nor even a woman’s, but realized after post- processing, in fact, I was looking at a little girl’s white lace dress.

Why only three years later, back in the safety of my studio in North America, could I see clearly? Perhaps for the same reason, that immediately after the Holocaust, not just in Canada, but globally the world was rendered speechless, unable to discuss the atrocities. Few survivors dared to speak of what happened to them and their families between 1939-45, and even fewer people wanted to listen. 

In the 1970s, I attended a gathering for survivors— I wanted to know, I wanted to listen. In the 90s, I read a large selection of memoirs by survivors. Yet, still, at the concentration camp, I couldn’t bear to imagine, against the darkest of backdrops, neither a little girl’s dress nor a little girl. Yet, like Anne Frank, Inge Auerbacher, spent her 8th, 9th, and 10th birthday there. Here is her testimony: 

Conditions in the camp were harsh. Potatoes were as valuable as diamonds. I was hungry, scared, and sick most of the time. For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a tiny potato cake with a hint of sugar; for my ninth birthday, an outfit sewn from rags for my doll; and for my tenth birthday, a poem written by my mother. - Inge Auerbacher